How to Convert Butter Between Sticks, Cups and Grams
Butter is the one ingredient where American and metric recipes diverge the most. US recipes call for sticks, cups, and tablespoons; the rest of the world weighs butter in grams. This butter converter bridges both directions exactly, because — unlike flour or sugar — a stick or cup of butter is a fixed weight by definition, so there's no guesswork.
The anchor is the US stick: one stick is a quarter-pound, which is 4 ounces, 113 grams, 8 tablespoons, or half a cup. Double it for a cup (2 sticks, 227 grams), and divide for the smaller units — a tablespoon of butter is about 14 grams, and a teaspoon about 4.7. Because these are conventions rather than densities, the numbers are precise: the converter weighs everything against the ounce, then expresses it in whatever unit you need.
Quick reference: butter conversions
| Butter | Sticks | Cups | Tbsp | Grams |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 tablespoon | ⅛ | 1/16 | 1 | 14 g |
| ½ stick | ½ | ¼ | 4 | 57 g |
| 1 stick | 1 | ½ | 8 | 113 g |
| 2 sticks | 2 | 1 | 16 | 227 g |
| 4 sticks (1 lb) | 4 | 2 | 32 | 454 g |
Measuring butter without a scale
If you only have a metric recipe and US stick butter, the wrapper is your ruler: each stick is divided into 8 tablespoon segments, so 100 grams is about 7 tablespoons — cut at the seventh mark and you're within a gram or two. Soft or melted butter is best measured by weight; a kitchen scale is the single most reliable upgrade for baking, since it removes the packing and melting errors that volume measurements invite.
Salted and unsalted butter weigh the same, so every conversion above works for either — the choice only changes seasoning, not the math. If your recipe calls for European-style butter sold in 250-gram blocks, convert by grams rather than sticks, since those blocks aren't portioned into tablespoons. For every other ingredient — flour, sugar, cocoa, dairy — the cups to grams converter covers the same volume-to-weight math with per-ingredient densities.